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In real-world scenarios, new audio classes with insufficient samples usually emerge continually, which motivates the study of few-shot class-incremental audio classification (FCAC) in this paper. FCAC aims to enable the model to recognize new audio classes while remembering the base ones continually. To solve the FCAC problem, the discriminability of the prototypes is vital to the model's classification performance. Thus, we proposed a method to learn the discriminative prototypes from two aspects. First, since the generalization ability of the embedding module (EM) significantly affects the discriminability of the prototypes, the proposed method employs a scheme of pseudo-episodic incremental training to train the EM by simulating the test scenario. Second, to enable the model to achieve a balanced classification performance on both base and new audio classes, the proposed method employs a selective-attention module to adjust different prototypes to enhance their discriminability. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in solving the FCAC problem. Notably, the proposed method achieves a comprehensive performance score (CPS) of 87.82% and 59.25% on the Neural Synthesis musical notes of 100 classes (NSynth-100) and Free sound clips of 89 classes (FSC-89) datasets, respectively, which outperforms the comparison methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/chester-w-xie/DPL_FCAC. • The few-shot class-incremental audio classification problem is studied in this paper. • The proposed method expands the model with discriminative prototypes. • A scheme is proposed to enhance the generalization ability of the embedding module. • A selective-attention-based module is proposed for prototype adjustment. • The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in solving the problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a frontier analysis procedure for evaluating the relative performance of decision making units (DMUs) with multiple inputs and multiple outputs. To improve its discrimination power, an important extension is proposed as cross-efficiency, which uses peer DMUs’ optimal relative weights to evaluate the relative performance. However, the existing cross-efficiency methods show an inconsistent and unbalanced evaluation standard, since each DMU might determine a different total (or mean) efficiency value across all DMUs. The different values imply that the DMUs that have assigned larger cross-efficiency scores will have a larger effect in aggregating the ultimate cross-efficiency scores and different DMUs’ effects are unbalanced in cross-efficiency methods. In this paper, we will deal with this unbalanced cross-efficiency evaluation problem. To this end, we first suggest a practical adjustment measure to rectify the traditional cross-efficiency, which will provide a common evaluation standard for all DMUs and make each DMU dispatch an identical total efficiency score across all DMUs. Further, we propose a game-like iterative procedure to obtain the optimal balanced cross-efficiency. Finally, we present both a numerical example and an empirical study derived from the literature and a real-world problem to demonstrate the usefulness and efficacy of the new balanced cross-efficiency evaluation approach. The work presented in this paper can extend the traditional cross-efficiency approaches to situations involving unbalanced evaluation standards, and make the evaluation results more practical significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nearest neighbor-based methods are classic techniques that, due to their efficiency, still are widely used today. However, they have not been broadly applied to solve the multi-instance multi-label (MIML) problem, a supervised learning paradigm that combines multi-instance (MI) and multi-label (ML) learning. This work presents new neighbor-based approaches for solving MIML problems. On the one hand, MIML data are transformed into ML data and ML nearest neighbor algorithms are used. On the other hand, algorithms that directly address MIML data and use a bag-based distance are proposed. A comprehensive study and an overall comparison have been conducted to study the performance of these methods using different configurations. Experiments included 16 datasets and 8 performance metrics. The results and statistical tests showed that the problem transformation applied and the distance function used impacted the performance and that the approaches that do not transform the problem obtained the best predictive results. Furthermore, most of the proposed algorithms outperformed the MIMLkNN algorithm, the state-of-art algorithm for MIML learning based on nearest-neighbor. Therefore, the relevance and capabilities of neighbor-based approaches to obtain competitive results in MIML learning are shown. Finally, all the algorithms developed in this paper have been included in the MIML library to facilitate the comparison with other future proposals. • New kNN methods for MIML based on logistic regression, gravitational model, and MAP. • Exhaustive study with 16 datasets and 8 evaluation measures to study the performance. • The transformation and the distance function influenced the predictive performance. • The gravitational model gets the best results with reasonable time complexity. • All the proposals outperform the state-of-art kNN-based algorithm in MIML. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The learning problem of continuous hidden Markov models (CHMMs) is the most critical and challenging one for the application of CHMMs. This paper aims to attack the learning problem of CHMMs by using the diversified gradient descent (DGD) algorithm. The novel learning formula of CHMM parameters, requiring no special form of the objective function and yielding various parameter estimates with different degree of diversity, is derived through dynamically adjusting the iterative procedure according to the gradient change of each parameter. It is the first work for standard CHMM attempting to obtain more local maxima so that the global maximum of the likelihood function of CHMM can be better approximated or even discovered. Hence this paper takes an important step forward in solving the learning problem of CHMM. Furthermore, a likelihood-based model averaging (LBMA) estimator is developed to achieve robust parameter estimation of CHMM based upon the diversiform models attained by the DGD algorithm. The proposed methods are tested on simulation and real-life bearing fault diagnosis problem. The results show that proposed methods perform better in parameter estimation and bearing fault diagnosis compared to the conventional methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has been successfully applied in many fields. In MARL, the policy evaluation problem is one of crucial problems. In order to solve this problem, distributed Temporal-Difference (TD) learning algorithm is one of the most popular methods in a cooperative manner. Despite its empirical success, however, the theory of the adaptive variant of distributed TD learning still remain limited. To fill this gap, we propose an adaptive distributed temporal-difference algorithm (referred to as MS - ADTD) under Markovian sampling over time-varying networks. Furthermore, we rigorously analyze the convergence of MS - ADTD , the theoretical results show that the local estimation can converge linearly to the optimal neighborhood. Meanwhile, the theoretical results are verified by simulation experiments. • This paper proposes a distributed adaptive TD learning algorithm under Markovian sampling. • It theoretically analyzes the non-asymptotic convergence performance of the proposed algorithm. • It verifies the performance of the proposed algorithm by experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Applying MSE to the field of lithology discrimination. • Designing a lithology recognition model based on SA optimized SVM algorithm. • Forming a set of lithology recognition methods based on machine learning. • Establishing a lithology intelligent recognition model. Lithology identification is an important part of petroleum drilling engineering. Accurate identification of lithology is the foundation to ensure the smooth operation of drilling engineering. Conventional lithology recognition mainly relies on human experience. The recognition accuracy depends on the level of technical personnel and the recognition response time is lagging. It is difficult to meet the demand. How to achieve rapid and intelligent recognition of lithology is one of the core technical problems faced by oil drilling. In order to solve this problem, this paper uses the mechanical specific energy and other ground parameters to establish a rapid and intelligent recognition method of lithology based on the simulated annealing optimization support vector machine model. In order to improve the accuracy of the model recognition, a large number of methods have been developed from two classes and multiple classes, simulation analysis results show that the lithology recognition model based on the principle of mechanical specific energy and the simulated annealing optimization support vector machine algorithm can predict a priori unknown data with a prediction accuracy of over 90%. Compared with the support vector machine model and the K-means model, simulated annealing optimization support vector machine is used for comparative analysis, the algorithm to establish a lithology recognition model has better performance and higher accuracy. The intelligent identification model of lithology based on the principle of mechanical specific energy and simulated annealing optimization support vector machine algorithm established in this paper can quickly and accurately identify lithology, and provide new technical support for oil drilling formation analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • A new method to solve global optimization and engineering problems called m-SCA. • The m-SCA improves the SCA using self-adaptation and opposition based learning. • Two set of benchmarks (classical and CEC 2014) is taken to evaluate the performance. • The m-SCA is also tested on engineering optimization problems. • Comparisons illustrate the improvement on the performance of m-SCA. Abstract Real-world optimization problems demand an efficient meta-heuristic algorithm which maintains the diversity of solutions and properly exploits the search space of the problem to find the global optimal solution. Sine Cosine Algorithm (SCA) is a recently developed population-based meta-heuristic algorithm for solving global optimization problems. SCA uses the characteristics of sine and cosine trigonometric functions to update the solutions. But, like other population-based optimization algorithms, SCA also suffers the problem of low diversity, stagnation in local optima and skipping of true solutions. Therefore, in the present work, an attempt has been made towards the eradication of these issues, by proposing a modified version of SCA. The proposed algorithm is named as modified Sine Cosine Algorithm (m-SCA). In m-SCA, the opposite population is generated using opposite numbers based on perturbation rate to jump out from the local optima. Secondly, in the search equations of SCA self-adaptive component is added to exploit all the promising search regions which are pre-visited. To evaluate the effectiveness in solving the global optimization problems, m-SCA has been tested on two sets of benchmark problems – classical set of 23 well-known benchmark problems and standard IEEE CEC 2014 benchmark test problems. In the paper, the performance of proposed algorithm m-SCA is also tested on five engineering optimization problems. The conducted statistical, convergence and average distance analysis demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed algorithm to determine the efficient solution of real-life global optimization problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Use of 7 different classification algorithms and NLP based features. • A Big URL Data Set is produced and shared (36,400 legitimate and 37,175 phishing). • Real-time and language-independent classification algorithms. • Feature-rich classifiers with Word Vectors, NLP-based and Hybrid features. • The proposed approach reaches 97.98% accuracy rate. Abstract Due to the rapid growth of the Internet, users change their preference from traditional shopping to the electronic commerce. Instead of bank/shop robbery, nowadays, criminals try to find their victims in the cyberspace with some specific tricks. By using the anonymous structure of the Internet, attackers set out new techniques, such as phishing, to deceive victims with the use of false websites to collect their sensitive information such as account IDs, usernames, passwords, etc. Understanding whether a web page is legitimate or phishing is a very challenging problem, due to its semantics-based attack structure, which mainly exploits the computer users' vulnerabilities. Although software companies launch new anti-phishing products, which use blacklists, heuristics, visual and machine learning-based approaches, these products cannot prevent all of the phishing attacks. In this paper, a real-time anti-phishing system, which uses seven different classification algorithms and natural language processing (NLP) based features, is proposed. The system has the following distinguishing properties from other studies in the literature: language independence, use of a huge size of phishing and legitimate data, real-time execution, detection of new websites, independence from third-party services and use of feature-rich classifiers. For measuring the performance of the system, a new dataset is constructed, and the experimental results are tested on it. According to the experimental and comparative results from the implemented classification algorithms, Random Forest algorithm with only NLP based features gives the best performance with the 97.98% accuracy rate for detection of phishing URLs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sentiment summarization is the process of automatically creating a compressed version of the opinionated information expressed in a text. This paper presents a machine learning-based approach to summarize user's opinion expressed in reviews using: (1) Sentiment knowledge to calculate a sentence sentiment score as one of the features for sentence-level classification. It integrates multiple strategies to tackle the following problems: sentiment shifter, the types of sentences and word coverage limit. (2) Word embedding model, a deep-learning-inspired method to understand meaning and semantic relationships among words and to extract a vector representation for each word. (3) Statistical and linguistic knowledge to determine salient sentences. The proposed method combines several types of features into a unified feature set to design a more accurate classification system ( “True”: the extractive reference summary; “False”: otherwise ). Thus, to achieve better performance scores, we carried out a performance study of four well-known feature selection techniques and seven of the most famous classifiers to select the most relevant set of features and find an efficient machine learning classifier, respectively. The proposed method is applied to three different datasets and the results show the integration of support vector machine-based classification method and Information Gain (IG) as a feature selection technique can significantly improve the performance and make the method comparable to other existing methods. Furthermore, our method that learns from this unified feature set can obtain better performance than one that learns from a feature subset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feature selection is an effective pre-processing step to remove possible redundant and irrelevant features for various machine learning paradigms, which can help build a more understandable machine learning based component in hybrid expert systems. Single-label quadratic programming feature selection (QPFS) model is formulated as a QP problem with a unit simplex constraint to both minimize feature-feature redundancy and maximize feature-label relevance simultaneously. Since its redundancy matrix is desired not to be positive semi-definite and then estimated by Nystrom low-rank approximation method, its performance depends greatly on under-sampling rate and random permutation. In this paper, without any approximation, we extend this model to construct a regularized version (rQPFS), resulting in a strictly convex QP problem, to achieve a globally optimal subset of features. To reduce the increment of computational time for entire redundancy matrix, Frank–Wolfe method with a sub-linear convergence rate and its special cases for strictly convex function and unit simplex constraint are applied to solve our rQPFS efficiently. Furthermore, to tackle multi-label FS paradigm, pruned problem transformation trick is used to evaluate feature-label relevance to describe label correlations sufficiently. The detailed experimental study on eight data sets shows that our proposed method performs the best, compared with six state-of-the-art multi-label FS methods, according to six instance-based performance evaluation measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning from imbalanced datasets is a frequent but challenging task for standard classification algorithms. Although there are different strategies to address this problem, methods that generate artificial data for the minority class constitute a more general approach compared to algorithmic modifications. Standard oversampling methods are variations of the SMOTE algorithm, which generates synthetic samples along the line segment that joins minority class samples. Therefore, these approaches are based on local information, rather on the overall minority class distribution. Contrary to these algorithms, in this paper the conditional version of Generative Adversarial Networks (cGAN) is used to approximate the true data distribution and generate data for the minority class of various imbalanced datasets. The performance of cGAN is compared against multiple standard oversampling algorithms. We present empirical results that show a significant improvement in the quality of the generated data when cGAN is used as an oversampling algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radio frequency identification (RFID) has been widely used for the automatic identification, tracking and tracing of goods throughout the supply chain from the manufacturer to the customer. However, one technological problem that impedes the productive and reliable use of RFID is the constraint of false positive readings, which refers to tags that are detected accidentally by the reader but not the ones of interest. This paper focuses on the use of machine learning algorithms to identify such RFID readings. A total of 11 statistical features are extracted from received signal strength (RSS) and phase rotations derived from the raw RFID data. Each of the features is highly statistically different to distinguish the false positive readings, but satisfactory classification cannot be achieved when these features are considered individually. Classifiers based on logistic regression (LR), support vector machine (SVM) and decision tree (DT) are constructed, which combine all of the extracted features to classify the RFID readings more effectively. The performance of the classifiers is evaluated in a real-world factory. Results show that SVM provides the highest accuracy of up to 95.3%. DT shows slightly better accuracy (92.85%) than LR (92.75%), while LR has the larger area under the curve (0.976) than DT (0.949). Overall, machine learning algorithms could achieve accuracy of 93% on average. The proposed methodology provides a much more reliable RFID application as false-positive readings are detected immediately without human intervention, which enables a significant potential of fully automatic identification and tracking of goods throughout the supply chain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a novel Evolutionary Mamdani Fuzzy Rule-based System named DECO 3 RUM ( D ifferential E volution based Co operative and Co mpeting learning of Co mpact Ru le-based M odels). The main advantage of DECO 3 RUM is that it offers simple and descriptive Mamdani models, without sacrificing the accuracy. It has further been designed to work with Big Data problems, where the number of patterns or features is significant. This is achieved through the successive use of three stages: (a) an instance selection stage, (b) an evolutionary rule base learning stage following the Genetic Cooperative Competitive Learning approach (where the novel Fuzzy Token Competition method based on AdaBoost tackles the cooperation-competition problem), which utilizes Differential Evolution as its learning algorithm, and (c) a post-processing stage to simplify the derived model and enhance its accuracy. DECO 3 RUM was validated using 24 datasets, and was additionally applied to one real-world high dimensional dataset from the domain of soil science. Through the comparisons with other state of the art evolutionary fuzzy systems it was demonstrated that DECO 3 RUM achieves a fair balance between accuracy and interpretability, performing better than its Mamdani counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we deal with the problem of designing a classifier able to learn the classification of existing units in inventory and then use it to classify new units according to their attributes in a multi-criteria ABC inventory classification environment. To solve this problem we design a multi-start constructive algorithm to train a discrete artificial neural network using a randomized greedy strategy to add neurons to the network hidden layer. The process of weights’ searching for the neurons to be added is based on solving linear programming formulations. The computational experiments show that the proposed algorithm is much more efficient when the dual formulations are used to find the weights of the network neurons and that the obtained classifier has good levels of generalization accuracy. In addition, the proposed algorithm can be straight applied to other multi-class classification problems with more than three classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spatial crowdsourcing has emerged as a new paradigm for solving problems in the physical world with the help of human workers. A major challenge in spatial crowdsourcing is to assign reliable workers to nearby tasks. The goal of such task assignment process is to maximize the task completion in the face of uncertainty. This process is further complicated when tasks arrivals are dynamic and worker reliability is unknown. Recent research proposals have tried to address the challenge of dynamic task assignment. Yet the majority of the proposals do not consider the dynamism of tasks and workers. They also make the unrealistic assumptions of known deterministic or probabilistic workers’ reliabilities. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for dynamic task assignment in spatial crowdsourcing. The proposed approach combines bi-objective optimization with combinatorial multi-armed bandits. We formulate an online optimization problem to maximize task reliability and minimize travel costs in spatial crowdsourcing. We propose the distance-reliability ratio (DRR) algorithm based on a combinatorial fractional programming approach. The DRR algorithm reduces travel costs by 80% while maximizing reliability when compared to existing algorithms. We extend the DRR algorithm for the scenario when worker reliabilities are unknown. We propose a novel algorithm (DRR-UCB) that uses an interval estimation heuristic to approximate worker reliabilities. Experimental results demonstrate that the DRR-UCB achieves high reliability in the face of uncertainty. The proposed approach is particularly suited for real-life dynamic spatial crowdsourcing scenarios. This approach is generalizable to the similar problems in other areas in expert systems. First, it encompasses online assignment problems when the objective function is a ratio of two linear functions. Second, it considers situations when intelligent and repeated assignment decisions are needed under uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generally, training images are essential for a computer vision model to classify specific object class accurately. Unfortunately, there exist countless number of different object classes in real world, and it is almost impossible for a computer vision model to obtain a complete training images for each of the different object class. To overcome this problem, zero-shot learning algorithm was emerged to learn unknown object classes from a set of known object classes information. Among these methods, attributes and image hierarchy are the widely used methods. In this paper, we combine both the strength of attributes and image hierarchy by proposing Attributes Relationship Model (ARM) to perform zero-shot learning. We tested the efficiency of the proposed algorithm on Animals with Attributes (AwA) dataset and manage to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy (50.61%) compare to other recent methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a multi-agent optimization algorithm (MAOA) is proposed for solving the resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP). In the MAOA, multiple agents work in a grouped environment where each agent represents a feasible solution. The evolution of agents is achieved by using four main elements in the MAOA, including social behavior, autonomous behavior, self-learning, and environment adjustment. The social behavior includes the global one and the local one for performing exploration. Through the global social behavior, the leader agent in every group is guided by the global best leader. Through the local social behavior, each agent is guided by its own leader agent. Through the autonomous behavior, each agent exploits its own neighborhood. Through the self-learning, the best agent performs an intensified search to further exploit the promising region. Meanwhile, some agents perform migration among groups to adjust the environment dynamically for information sharing. The implementation of the MAOA for solving the RCPSP is presented in detail, and the effect of key parameters of the MAOA is investigated based on the Taguchi method of design of experiment. Numerical testing results are provided by using three sets of benchmarking instances. The comparisons to the existing algorithms demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed MAOA for solving the RCPSP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feature selection (FS) is recognized as one of the majority public and challenging problems in the Machine Learning domain. FS can be examined as an optimization problem that needs an effective optimizer to determine its optimal subset of more informative features. This paper proposes a wrapper FS method that combines chaotic maps (CMs) and binary Group Search Optimizer (GSO) called CGSO, which is used to solve the FS problem. In this method, five chaotic maps are incorporated with the GSO algorithm's main procedures, namely, Logistic, Piecewise, Singer, Sinusoidal, and Tent. The GSO algorithm is used as a search strategy, while k-NN is employed as an induction algorithm. The objective function is to integrate three main objectives: maximizing the classification accuracy value, minimizing the number of selected features, and minimizing the complexity of generated k-NN models. To evaluate the proposed methods' performance, twenty well-known UCI datasets are used and compared with other well-known published methods in the literature. The obtained results reveal the superiority of the proposed methods in outperforming other well-known methods, especially when using binary GSO with Tent CM. Finally, it is a beneficial method to be utilized in systems that require FS pre-processing. • A novel feature selection method is proposed for classification task. • Five Chaotic Group Search Optimizers are investigated. • Twenty UCI datasets were used in the experiments. • Our methods got a higher accuracy results using a fewer number of features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corporate financial distress prediction research has been ongoing for more than half a century, during which many models have emerged, among which ensemble learning algorithms are the most accurate. Most of the state-of-the-art methods of recent years are based on gradient boosted decision trees. However, most of them do not consider using feature importance for feature selection, and a few of them use the feature importance method with bias, which may not reflect the true importance of features. To solve this problem, a heuristic algorithm based on permutation importance (PIMP) is proposed to modify the biased feature importance measure in this paper. This method ranks and filters the features used by machine learning models, which not only improves accuracy but also makes the results more interpretable. Based on financial data from 4,167 listed companies in China between 2001 and 2019, the experiment shows that compared with using the random forest (RF) wrapper method alone, the bias in feature importance is indeed corrected by combining the PIMP method. After the redundant features are removed, the performance of most machine learning models is improved. The PIMP method is a promising addition to the existing financial distress prediction methods. Moreover, compared with traditional statistical learning models and other machine learning models, the proposed PIMP-XGBoost offers higher prediction accuracy and clearer interpretation, making it suitable for commercial use. • The model Combines a corrected feature selection measure and XGBoost. • Permutation importance can correct the bias of feature importance. • The model is validated on Chinese listed companies datasets over five metrics. • The model is proved to outperform several benchmark techniques. • The feature importance and partial dependence plot enhance model interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Through the years, decision trees have been widely used both to represent and to conduct decision processes. They can be automatically induced from databases using supervised learning algorithms which usually aim at minimizing the size of the tree. When inducing decision trees in a medical setting, the induction process should consider the background knowledge used by health-care professionals to make decisions in order to produce decision trees that are medically and clinically comprehensible and correct. Comprehensibility measures the medical coherence of the sequence of questions represented in the tree, and correctness rates how much irrelevant are the errors of the decision tree from a medical or clinical point of view. Some algorithms partially solve these problems pursuing alternative objectives as reducing the economic cost or improving the adherence of the decision process to medical standards. However, from a clinical point of view, none of these criteria is valid when it is considered alone, because real medical decisions are taken attending to a combination of them, and also other health-care criteria, simultaneously. Moreover, this combination of criteria is not static and may vary if the decision tree is made for different purposes as screening, diagnosing, prognosing or drug and therapy prescription. In this paper, a decision tree induction algorithm that uses combinations of health-care criteria is presented and used to generate decision trees for screening and diagnosing in four medical domains. The mechanisms to formalize and to combine these criteria are also presented. The results have been analyzed from both a statistical and a medical point of view, and they suggest that our algorithm obtains decision trees that physicians evaluated as more comprehensible and correct than the decision trees obtained by previous approaches as they keep an equivalent accuracy. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The problem of scheduling jobs to minimize total weighted tardiness in flowshops, with the possibility of evolving into hybrid flowshops in the future, is investigated in this paper. As this research is guided by a real problem in industry, the flowshop considered has considerable flexibility, which stimulated the development of an innovative methodology for this research. Each stage of the flowshop currently has one or several identical machines. However, the manufacturing company is planning to introduce additional machines with different capabilities in different stages in the near future. Thus, the algorithm proposed and developed for the problem is not only capable of solving the current flow line configuration but also the potential new configurations that may result in the future. A meta-heuristic search algorithm based on tabu search is developed to solve this NP-hard, industry-guided problem. Six different initial solution finding mechanisms are proposed. A carefully planned nested split-plot design is performed to test the significance of different factors and their impact on the performance of the different algorithms. To the best of our knowledge, this research is the first of its kind that attempts to solve an industry-guided problem with the concern for future developments. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Widespread digitization of information in today’s internet age has intensified the need for effective textual document classification algorithms. Most real life classification problems, including text classification, genetic classification, medical classification, and others, are complex in nature and are characterized by high dimensionality. Current solution strategies include Naïve Bayes (NB), Neural Network (NN), Linear Least Squares Fit (LLSF), k-Nearest-Neighbor (kNN), and Support Vector Machines (SVM); with SVMs showing better results in most cases. In this paper we introduce a new approach called dynamic architecture for artificial neural networks (DAN2) as an alternative for solving textual document classification problems. DAN2 is a scalable algorithm that does not require parameter settings or network architecture configuration. To show DAN2 as an effective and scalable alternative for text classification, we present comparative results for the Reuters-21578 benchmark dataset. Our results show DAN2 to perform very well against the current leading solutions (kNN and SVM) using established classification metrics. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Fundamental to case-based reasoning is the assumption that similar problems have similar solutions. The meaning of the concept of “similarity” can vary in different situations and remains an issue. This paper proposes a novel similarity model consisting of fuzzy rules to represent the semantics and evaluation criteria for similarity. We believe that fuzzy if-then rules present a more powerful and flexible means to capture domain knowledge for utility oriented similarity modeling than traditional similarity measures based on feature weighting. Fuzzy rule-based reasoning is utilized as a case matching mechanism to determine whether and to which extent a known case in the case library is similar to a given problem in query. Further, we explain that such fuzzy rules for similarity assessment can be learned from the case library using genetic algorithms. The key to this is pair-wise comparisons of cases with known solutions in the case library such that sufficient training samples can be derived for genetic-based fuzzy rule learning. The evaluations conducted have shown the superiority of the proposed method in similarity modeling over traditional schemes as well as the feasibility of learning fuzzy similarity rules from a rather small case base while still yielding competent system performance. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Decision support systems are powerful technologies for complex decision making and problem solving. However, constructing an accurate and interpretable decision support system (DSS) for any domain is a challenge. In this paper, a novel hierarchical co-evolutionary fuzzy system called HiCEFS is presented that can autonomously derive a fuzzy rule-based DSS from exemplar data. Most of the important components in HiCEFS, including irregular shaped membership functions (ISMFs) and fuzzy rules, are generated using a hierarchical co-evolutionary genetic algorithm that simultaneously co-evolves these components in separate genetic populations. Owing to its generic learning capability, the HiCEFS approach can be easily applied to produce DSSs for classification and regression tasks in various domains. As a case study, HiCEFS is employed to construct a DSS for detecting gamma ray signals. Experimental results show that the system is able to successfully discern the gamma rays from background hadrons, and performs superior to other established techniques. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The popularity of using Internet contains some risks of network attacks. Intrusion detection is one major research problem in network security, whose aim is to identify unusual access or attacks to secure internal networks. In literature, intrusion detection systems have been approached by various machine learning techniques. However, there is no a review paper to examine and understand the current status of using machine learning techniques to solve the intrusion detection problems. This chapter reviews 55 related studies in the period between 2000 and 2007 focusing on developing single, hybrid, and ensemble classifiers. Related studies are compared by their classifier design, datasets used, and other experimental setups. Current achievements and limitations in developing intrusion detection systems by machine learning are present and discussed. A number of future research directions are also provided. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Due to the actual operation of the wind turbine, the collected fault data sets are limited, and it is difficult to realize fault diagnosis through the correlation between variables. To solve this problem, a fault diagnosis method based on virtual expansion and spherical mapping model is proposed in this paper. Firstly, Hermite interpolation is applied to discrete wind power data samples to obtain an interpolation curve about the characteristics of the sample, and a synchronous sampling method is adopted for the interpolation curve to construct a virtual sample. Then, the features of the virtual sample are mapped to a three-dimensional space. Define the spherical data model and perform spherical fitting in a three-dimensional coordinate system. Finally, feature extraction is performed on the fitted spherical surface for training and testing extreme learning machine (ELM). The distribution law of fault data in the spherical model is summarized. Using the data generated based on the Bootstrap method as a control group, comparative experiments were carried out in back-propagation neural network (BP), Probabilistic Neural Network (PNN), General Regression Neural Network (GRNN), and Support Vector Machine (SVM), which verified the effectiveness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • Two novel DR methods are proposed to extract critical discriminative information. • Neighborhood size parameters of DR models are decided adaptively via data similarity. • Outside data can be projected directly through SD-IsoP that prevents over-fitting. • Margins between classes in reduced space can be maximized by proposed methods. As one of the most popular nonlinear dimensionality reduction methods, Isomap has been widely used in pattern recognition and machine learning. However, Isomap has the following problems: (1) Isomap is an unsupervised dimensionality reduction method, it cannot use class label information to obtain discriminative low dimensional embedding for classification; (2) The embedding performance of Isomap is sensitive to neighborhood size parameter; (3) Isomap cannot deal with outside new data by direct embedding. In this paper, a novel dimensionality reduction method called supervised discriminant Isomap is proposed to solve the first two problems mentioned above. Specifically, first, raw data points are partitioned into different manifolds by using their class label information. Then, supervised discriminant Isomap aims at seeking an optimal nonlinear subspace to preserve the geometrical structure of each manifold according to the Isomap criterion, and to enhance the discriminating capability by maximizing the distances between data points of different classes and the maximum margin graph regularization term. Finally, the corresponding optimization problems are solved by using eigen-decomposition algorithm. Further, we extend supervised discriminant Isomap to a linear dimensionality reduction method called supervised discriminant Isomap projection for handling the above three problems. Moreover, our approaches have three important characteristics: (1) Proposed methods adaptively estimate the local neighborhood surrounding each sample based on data density and similarity; (2) The objective functions of proposed methods can maximize margins between the each classes in the dimension-reduced feature space; (3) The objective functions of proposed methods have closed-form solutions. Furthermore, our methods can capture more discriminative information from raw data than other Isomap based methods. Extensive experiments on nine data sets demonstrate that the proposed methods are superior to the related state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]